Speakers' Corner

On the one hand, the project is designed to make people aware of the timeliness of historical texts and thus to underline the relevance of the humanities in an increasingly technologised, output- and market-oriented society. On the other hand, the publicly recited texts are supposed to stimulate the critical reflection and discussion of current socio-political issues.

Foto eines Gebäudes auf dem einige Fenster offen stehen und eine Person zu erkennen ist.

Speakers' Corner

Does everything stay the same?

Old texts, new contexts

Does everything stay the same? This is the question asked by the project Speaker’s Corner, which puts socio-historical texts from the Middle Age to the 20th century into relation with current contexts. In a first test run in the summer of 2013, two actors recited historical texts from 14th-century Byzantium to the Jewish Central Europe of the Enlightenment to the Germany of the global economic crisis in the early 1930s at public locations in Frankfurt, Göttingen, and Berlin. In this context, the parallelism of societal questions that have occupied us back then and still do today is striking: obligations and rights of civil servants, the dignity of the fellow citizen and his/her right to self-fulfillment, tax evasion, surveillance by the state, protection against terrorism, social and psychological consequences of unemployment.

participating Alumnae / Alumni